[ofa-general] Re: [PATCH RFC] opensm/event_plugin: plugin API version 2

[Hal Rosenstock]

Hi Sasha,

On Sat, 2008-06-28 at 02:03 +0300, Sasha Khapyorsky wrote:
> Hi Jason,
> 
> On 14:37 Fri 27 Jun     , Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> >
> > How is this better than just patching opensm directly for people who
> > want these kinds of things?
> 
> It is not better, it is different. Some things can be unrelated to
> "pure" SM/SA functionality and not be part of OpenSM project, but
> sometimes we may want to have it as part of OpenSM process, examples
> are existing plugin 'opensmskumme' (it loads performance counters to
> MySQL db), we wanted to have IB diagnostics plugin and management related
> plugin.

If this idea catches on, aside from exposing the internals in an
unstructured manner, I see a mix and match issue with plugins developing
which may lead to certain OpenSM versions being selected for
compatibility or worse no choice due to plugin version compatibility as
they get to support whatever versions they choose.

Might this be better handled as packaging with separate packages based
on licenses ?

> > You can do alot of good by making the internal APIs 'plug in like' so
> > adding new things doesn't require touching lots of places without
> > going down the whole messy road of actual dynamically loadable plug ins..
> > 
> > But if you can't identify a fixed, clean API for a dynamically
> > loadable plugin then you almost certainly should not have them in an
> > open source project...
> > 
> > This is probably better long term as far as encouraging more
> > contribution to opensm rather than encouraging contributions to be
> > kept as plugins..

I think this is safer from an engineering and support standpoint.

> GPL is some sort of an issue - OFA requires dual licensing, so GPL only
> code cannot enter OpenSM.

Yes, OFA licensing is dual BSD and GPL. Perhaps some modification is
needed to handle this scenario for OpenSM better. Was that
entertained/explored ?

-- Hal

> Sasha
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